Reflections Blog

I recently saw an old Mel Gibson movie with the provocative title, “What Women Want.” Naturally, I was hoping to discover this morsel of information, so long sought-after by males hungering to please the women in their lives. The movie proved to be moderately amusing, but ultimately a scam, as it never did say what women want, unless it was implying that women want Mel Gibson.

But at least it served the purpose of getting me to think about the subject. I believe this is part of what women want – for men to be thinking about it. If men are thinking about golf or cars, then they can’t be thinking about making a woman happy. Of course, the man in question must be thinking about how to please the woman in question, not another woman, as sometimes happens. This is definitely not what women want. In some cases, for the man to be aware that the woman does want something is a major step forward.

A while back, I thought I had stumbled upon what women want. Actually, I didn’t exactly stumble upon it. My wife sort of told me, and a female friend confirmed that I would ignore it at my own peril. What my wife wanted was for me to do the vacuuming. But there was more to it: she wanted me to do it all the time. And, most importantly and unbelievably, she wanted me to do it without being told.

The first few times I vacuumed, my wife made a big fuss and made me feel very good about having pleased her. Then it occurred to me that she was using positive reinforcement training methods. This made me wonder about the whole male-female relationship, and if women are really a higher level of being, who keep men around basically as pets. I get a headache when I start to think like that. Fortunately, whenever it happens, I just go to my wife and look sad until she scratches me behind the ears and rubs my belly, and then I feel much better.

I have since learned that there is a little more to pleasing women than vacuuming. For example, there is changing the vacuum cleaner bag. This was another revelation. I suppose it shouldn’t have been a surprise that the bag in a dirt-sucking apparatus would need to be changed from time to time. It seemed to be one of those things that just happened. Little bag-changing elves flit in and out of houses, working on some cosmic schedule, knowing which bags are naughty and which are nice. I have to hand it to the elves, as changing that bag can be tricky, not to mention disgusting.

Sometimes a particularly cynical man will say that women don’t know what they want. A related philosophy is that women present a moving target – as soon as a man figures out what a woman wants, she changes her mind. I began to suspect this when, while vacuuming for the third time in five hours, and thinking I’m racking up a world record number of points, my wife told me (with exasperation, for some reason) that maybe I should consider doing some laundry or emptying the dishwasher instead. As if I’m a mind reader or something! I mean, does vacuuming make her happy, or not? I really don’t think she’s sincere about helping me out.

Join us next time for more riveting information on pleasing women, when we hear Joe say: What do you mean your jeans don’t go in the hot cycle?